Mountain Air
by indigobluewriter
Summary: A day in the mountains changes Georg's outlook. This was written as a result of the February prompt on the fabulous Sound-of-Music-fics website!


Mountain Air

He shouldn't have done it.

He knew he shouldn't have done it, but he did it. And from then on, the complexities that that simple act had engendered had kept him awake at night…half afraid, half excited.

It had started when the baroness had wanted to pay a visit to an elderly relative in the foothills of the Alps. After a tiresome, winding journey through the mist, with visitor duly deposited, he and Max had headed off higher up the mountains, "Just like old times when we were boys", Max had said.

As the fog cleared and allowed sun to break through, it seemed as though the snowy peaks were scraping the blue above. They walked till they were out of breath, taking in deep lungfuls of mountain air, cowbells clanging as those animals grazed. Drinking in the view, the two men asked themselves why it had been so long since they had been up there.

So they strode higher till they were on the alm, accompanied by skylarks, the crunch of frozen grass, the trickling of melting ice. Regenerated by such primal things, Georg was in his element; refreshed at drinking a glaciate waterfall , startled at coming eye to eye with an ibex, he was climbing up and back to his youth. Stooping to pick familiar flowers, he smelled them as he walked, bringing echoes of summers past, the faces of old friends, laughter in the snow; for it was decades since he had held such things in his hand.

They were almost at the top, when a sudden shout from Max about the time made Georg realise they would be late collecting the baroness; he thrust the flowers into his pocket and headed downhill, the two men jumping from tussock to tussock like children towards the car which glinted in the valley below.

The return home had been awkward, their late arrival a sore point since Elsa had long run out of conversation with her relative. Arriving home, she retired to her room and Georg to his study, whilst Max helped himself to the house whisky.

The next day, searching for a lost whistle in the coatroom, Georg felt a soft bulge in his jacket pocket, and feeling inside, pulled out the soft mossy stems of the flowers he had picked, by now flaccid and wilting in his hand. He picked through them, smelt them, reminisced about them and life on the alm, before gathering them up in a sad little bunch with a view to casting them away. Just one flower remained fresh, its stiff little petals just as he found them hiding in the grass, modest and small. He turned it over, looking at it for some time before moving across the room to dispose of the limp bouquet in his fingers. In doing so, he spied Maria's cardigan, hanging on her peg, as it did whenever she was out. He hesitated as he walked past, looked up at it again, slowly reaching up and pausing for a moment with arms outstretched. Then, carefully, he threaded the flower's stem into the buttonhole in her lapel, pulling it through so that the petals sat facing the front. Then he went to cast the other plants into the bin, and on returning, glanced up to see the white flower nestling into the fawn folds of her cardigan, reminding him of that evening when he had sung a song of Edelweiss to his children, and, looking up, saw her sinking, smiling, into the warmth of the shadows.

He understood now. Growing up in the mountains had given her a freshness and simplicity that was totally natural, something that he had found bewitching from the moment he had met her; his day on the alm had served to awaken instincts in him that had been long forgotten, but which he was determined to preserve. The buttonholing was simply a gesture, he told himself, nothing more. But he knew, too, that he couldn't stop himself doing it.

He knew he shouldn't have done it, but he had dared to do it, thinking the matter would end there.

Then two days later, reaching for his trilby, he found a red pimpernel set at a jaunty angle in his hatband. Lying awake at night, pacing the moonlit room, he knew it could only have been from Maria. Things weren't going to be easy; something had started between them, he just wasn't quite sure what. But he knew he was madly, deeply happy that it had.


End file.
